Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived

A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?

Update: seemingly not

Update: Oh yeah!

Friday, January 03, 2003

Grasshoper mind, part whatever it is

More flapdoodle and what have you, on a fairly scattershot day ....

Great. So now we're being brought to the brink of annihilation by the idiot son of a mass murderer who has foolishly been given access to weapons of mass destruction. Not only that, but Kim Jong-Il is pretty scary too.

Nobody on the left seems to have a good word for professional wrestling, but where else on mass market television do you see the owner-class uniformly and consistently portrayed as villains1? Furthermore, I'd always suspected as much, but Subcommandante Marcos' latest escapade (challenging Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon to a public debate, with the stakes being the revelation of his identity) reveals squarely that he's using the mask to put himself squarely in the Mexican luchador tradition of the masked man who comes to save the day for the underdogs. Wrestling is radical

As far as I can see, a lot of people on the internet appear to hold the view that the people themselves know what is best far better than any central organisation of experts could ever do, and should thus be trusted on every subject except that of the correct size of medical negligence settlements. As far as I can tell, these wise, fair-minded sage-citizens, who know so much about the correct allocation of local tax policy and have such exquisite judgement in popular television, immediately turn into venal, slack-jawed, profligate dupes the moment they enter a courtroom, just waiting for a lawyer to whip them up into a frenzy of pity and class hatred against rich doctors. Then they leave the courtroom, having dumped vast amounts of largess on the head of some malingering ne'er-do-well, and return to Olympian sagacity, leaving behind any traces of resentment of their betters. Don't laugh, it could happen.

This article seems to miss what has always seemed to me to be the best evidence for the existence of a divine being; that an awful lot of people over the years, including a disproportionate amount of people who have proved to have been utterly honest on every other issue, have reported experiences of the divine. Given the vast number of accounts in history of experiences divine revelation, I never quite understand why people are not content to argue for the existence of God on empirical grounds alone. Unless, of course, one is using the word "empirical" to mean "all and only all those kinds of experience which tend to confirm the scientific viewpoint", or in other words, that one is going to say out of hand that anyone claiming to have had a divine revelation is mad or lying, at which point the circularity of most atheist arguments becomes pretty plain.

1The Von Mises Institute essay is an absolute bloody riot, and someone should be given a medal for it. Where else on the Internet are you going to find out that " the most serious assault on upper-level management currently underway on American television is occurring in the world of professional wrestling, and in my expert opinion the leading cultural indicator in the U.S. is the Worldwide Wrestling"? I'm seriously considering adding them to my permalink list above. The really hilarious thing is that this website is also a massively important web resource of old Austrian texts. I'd pay a small amount of money for a "random page from the Mises Institute" button.